I liked the first game and read the review of the second, but journalistic fellatio really turns me off to games, as I've played many, many titles people claimed to be masterpieces only to be horribly let down and find really big flaws that the reviewers severely downplayed.

I've got one of each class right now with my highest being a 58 Engineer. Still loving it.

I stand by my take on it which is that if you like isometric Action RPGs/loot droppers, you will like Torchlight 2. If you are a dabbler in that sort of game you might not see too much that strikes you as "different" about it, but folks who will pretty much play any game that falls in that category will I think be more likely to see some of the tweaking and improvements that have been done to keep the pace high.

And it isn't perfect. The graphics are fun, but they are not spectacular. And I think the multiplayer match making needs some work. And the best that can be said about the story is it is functional and exists.

But gameplay-wise I really do think this is as good as this type of game has ever been. As with any review, YMMV, but I did try to illustrate these points, often in lengthy fashion.

Plus, $20. I mean at worst you will have missed a night at the movies, and I'm pretty sure you'll get at least a couple hours of entertainment out of it even if you end up hating it.

Downloaded it, played it for a while. It's a mixed bag. I like the new class - rather than having a few good skills and a bunch of crappy ones, there are a ton that seem good, and it's tough to decide where to put my points. A few of them actually seem a little too good. There's a passive skill that at level 1 heals you for 20 points/second for every monster within 10 meters, plus does a few other things. Since you can only get hit by so many people, this pretty much means you should go get mobbed, and you probably can't die.

There seem to be a lot of monsters, and even from the start, you find elites, which drop great loot and beef up your fame XP, which isn't necessarily a good thing for balance. They drop a lot more gems than before, which is kind of nice, but they're not any more powerful than before, which is probably also good.

And they've done stuff to the inventories. They've definitely increased the shared stash immensely, and I'm not sure yet, but I think they've added several pages to what you can carry on your person.

So what I'd say is that it's fun, but you may not love everything about it. Definitely back up your saves and the original PAK files before playing, as these instructions suggest.

Oh, and if you can't find where Steam installed Torchlight 2, it might be at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Torchlight II (I'm on Windows 7 64 bit). While I was in there, I noticed that there's a soundtrack folder! Not the music files the game uses, but a set of mp3s and a pdf CD booklet. Very cool - kind of bummed I didn't know about this before.